The real dimension of analgesic activity of aspirin

Anti-Oomycete Effect and Mechanism of Salicylic Acid on Phytophthora infestans

Pathogenic oomycetes infect a wide variety of organisms, including plants, animals, and humans, and cause massive economic losses in global agriculture, aquaculture, and human health. Salicylic acid (SA), an endogenous phytohormone, is regarded as an inducer of plant immunity. Here, the potato late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans was used as a model system to uncover the inhibitory mechanisms of SA on pathogenic oomycetes. In this research, SA significantly inhibited the mycelial growth, sporulation, sporangium germination, and virulence of P. infestans. Inhibition was closely related to enhanced autophagy, suppression of translation initiation, and ribosomal biogenesis in P. infestans, as shown by multiomics analysis (transcriptomics, proteomics, and phosphorylated proteomics). Monodansylcadaverine (MDC) staining and Western blotting analysis showed that SA promoted autophagy in P. infestans by probably targeting the TOR signaling pathway. These observations suggest that SA has the potential to control late blight caused by P. infestans.

A disease-drug-phenotype matrix inferred by walking on a functional domain network

Protein domains are classified as units of structure, evolution and function, and thus form the molecular backbone of biosphere. Although functional networks at the protein level have been reported to be of value in predicting diseases (phenotypes or drugs), they have not previously been applied at the sub-protein resolution (protein domain in this case). We herein introduce a domain network with a functional perspective. This network has nodes consisting of protein domains (at the superfamily/evolutionary level), with edges weighted by the semantic similarity according to domain-centric Gene Ontology (dcGO) annotations, which henceforth we call "dcGOnet". By globally exploring this network via a random walk, we demonstrate its predictive value on disease, drug, or phenotype-related ontologies. On cross-validation recovering ontology labels for domains, we achieve an overall area under the ROC curve of 89.0% for drugs, 87.3% for diseases, 87.6% for human phenotypes and 88.2% for mouse phenotypes. We show that the performance using global information from this network is significantly better than using local information, and also illustrate that the better performance is not sensitive to network size, or the choice of algorithm parameters, and is universal to different ontologies. Based on the dcGOnet and its global properties, we further develop an approach to build a disease-drug-phenotype matrix. The predicted interconnections are statistically supported using a novel randomization procedure, and are also empirically supported by inspection for biological relevance. Most of the high-ranking predictions recover connections that are well known, but others uncover connections that have only suggestive or obscure support in the literature; we show that these are missed by simpler methods, in particular for drug-disease connections. The value of this work is threefold: we describe a general methodology and make the software available, we provide the functional domain network itself, and the ranked drug-disease-phenotype matrix provides rich targets for investigation. All three can be found at .

From the nutcracker-phenomenon of the left renal vein to the midline congestion syndrome as a cause of migraine, headache, back and abdominal pain and functional disorders of pelvic organs

This paper presents the hypothesis, that pain and functional disturbances of organs which lie on the midline of the body might be caused by a venous congestion of these organs. Cause of their congestion is the participation of these organs (vertebral column, skull, brain, spinal medullary, uterus, prostate, left ovary/testis, urinary bladder rectum, vagina, urethra) in the collateral circulation of the left renal vein. In many patients with complaints of the above mentioned organs the left renal vein is compressed inside the fork formed by the superior mesenteric artery and the aorta. This so called nutcracker phenomenon is incompletely understood today. It can lead to a marked reduction of left renal perfusion and forces the left renal blood to bypass the venous compression site via abundant collaterals. These collaterals are often not sufficient. Their walls become stretched and distorted - varices with inflamed walls are formed. These dilated veins are painful, interfere with the normal organ's function and demand more space than usual. This way pain in the midline organs and functional derangement of the midline organs can occur. The term "midline congestion syndrome" seems appropriate to reflect the comprehensive nature of this frequent disorder. The rationale for this hypothesis is based on the novel PixelFlux-technique (www.chameleon-software.de) of renal tissue perfusion measurement. With this method a relevant decline of left renal cortical perfusion was measured in 16 affected patients before therapy (left/right ratio: 0.79). After a treatment with acetylsalicylic acid in doses from 15 to 200mg/d within 14-200 days a complete relief of so far long lasting therapy-resistant midline organ symptoms was achieved. Simultaneously the left/right renal perfusion ratio increased significantly to 1.24 (p=0.021). This improvement of left renal perfusion can be explained by a better drainage of collateral veins, diminution of their wall distension, thereby decline of their intramural inflammation, reduction of their mass effects (especially by the replaced spinal fluid inside the spinal canal and the skull), and altogether a reduction of pain and functional derangement in the affected midline organs. The proposed theory might influence the current understanding of such frequent and difficult to treat diseases as chronic back pain, headaches, frequent cystitis, enuresis, abdominal pain, flank pain and might spur new theories of arterial hypertension, placental insufficiency, prostate diseases and myelopathies.